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Inside Report on
The Dictate
Jack Oakie who burlesques a diet ai or in Charlie Chaplin's film, disensses the corned v
By CHARLES l»\H\TO\
| For several years Charlie Chaplin has been feverishly at work upon the most daring motion picture thus far ventured in a hair-trigger era. All Hollywood has been making all sorts of guesses about it. Would Charlie actually hit off Hitler? Would he speak at last on the screen and if so in German dialect? Would he step out of his humble shuffle into a cocky strut? Would — ?
And now, for the first time, the answers can be told. Authentically, they can be given by a fellow comedian who was not only behind the scenes but in them, as a comic dictator himself.
Jack Oakie was discovered on the Young People set playing pappy to Shirley Temple and looking up to the stratospheric Charlotte Greenwood who will be seen in that film as his wife and vaudeville sidekick. Dapper in a light double-breasted suit and sporting a flower in his buttonhole, the irrepressible funster who had made a rushing come-back, via his part of Benzino Gasolini in the Chaplin picture, swung out of the American scene and, flipping off a gray soft hat and indicating the initials "W B" stamped on its sweatband, cracked, "See — Warner Baxter — I wear all his old clothes."
But only recently he had been wearing a uniform and with it no doubt a mighty air. And how had he felt about it?
"Thrilled," was [Continued on page 571
Oakie had his chin out for days as he practised his comic version of the salute used by "Benzino Gasolini" in the film
EDITOR'S NOTE
Nearly three years ago, when Charlie Chaplin began to make plans for his film burlesquing dictators, very few people dreamed that the time ever would come when there would be serious discussion of the complete cancellation of the picture. Some of the aspects of Hitler's enterprises still had a wryly comic overtone. But, just before this magazine went to press, so many people were asking "Can Charlie Chaplin make anything about Hitler seem funny now?" that the rumor of the shelving of the entire picture spread through the papers. So much credence was given the rumor that Charlie Chaplin denied it in these words: "The report that I have withdrawn my film is entirely without foundation. More than ever, now, the world needs to laugh. At a time like this, laughter is a safety valve for our sanity."
Fawcett photo by Charles Rhodes Drawiuir by Llewellyn Miller
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